Civic Education in USA

Civic education, whenever and however undertaken, prepares people of a country, especially the young, to carry out their roles as citizens. Civic education is, therefore, political education or, as Amy Gutmann describes it, “the cultivation of the virtues, knowledge, and skills necessary for political participation”. Of course, in some regimes political participation and therefore civic education can be limited or even negligible.

Though commonly associated with schooling, civic education is not the exclusive domain of schools. A rightly famous rendition of this idea is Tocqueville's often quoted view: “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.” Therefore, understanding civic education, especially democratic education, can, and should, involve both formal settings (schools) and informal settings (families, communities, libraries, houses of worship, workplaces, civic organizations, unions, sports teams, campaigns and elections, mass media, and so on). Indeed, it seems reasonable to suggest that, following the Athenians of the Classical Age, a sound and effective civic education will coordinate if not integrate these formal and informal settings.

The informal settings and methods are most often associated with political socialization. This entry, however, focuses largely on schooling, which, as Amy Gutmann also points out, is our most deliberate form of human instruction. That is, formal civic education is a term reserved for the organized system of schooling (predominantly public) that aims, as one of its primary purposes, to prepare future citizens for participation in public life. Thus civic education as currently understood is to be contrasted, for example, with paideia (See below.) and other forms of citizen preparation that are informal cultural productions.

Of course, in many significant ways, informal institutions of civic education do help prepare citizens for public participation. Yet today, as Gutmann suggests, the educative effects are often not the deliberate design or intention of those informal institutions. If one were to try to cover all those social and political institutions that had educative effects, the project would become unmanageable. Besides, if we considered civic education to be part of what goes on in any institution even remotely related to civil society, then we are no longer defining and discussing civic education, but are defining and discussing politics itself.

At the same time that civic educators seek to impart skills, knowledge, and participatory virtues, they also seek to engrain in society's youth a felt connection to, if not an identity with, that country or society.

Democratic education is a subset of civic education. For philosophers it is the most important—indeed, the predominant—subset. This entry, therefore, focuses exclusively on the subset of democratic education.

There are, of course, more propitious reasons for examining civic education in the context of democracies. One significant reason, for example, can be traced to Aristotle. In The Politics Aristotle asks whether there is any case “in which the excellence of the good citizen and the excellence of the good man coincide”. The answer for him is politea or the mixed constitution in which persons must know both how to rule and how to obey. Herein coincide the excellence, the virtues, of the good man and the good citizen. Thus in modern democracies society has a vested interest in preparing citizens to rule and to be ruled, as Aristotle pointed out. In democracies, therefore, and especially in civic education the virtues of the citizen are an important, and even a vital, aspect of the virtues of a good person.

In a democracy, however, because of its combination of “numerous and more varied points of shared common interest” and its requirement of “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse,” which Dewey called “progress,” education could address personal development and “full and free interplay” among social groups (Ibid, 83, 79). In other words, it is in democratic states that we want to look for the preparation of good persons as well as good citizens; that is, for democratic education, which in this context, to repeat for emphasis, is what is meant by civic education.

THE GOOD CITIZEN such as:

Future citizens might be required only to know how, for example, a democratic system works—the functions of the different branches, the purpose and procedures of elections, the history of the country's systems of governance and governmental institutions—and to know the rights and obligations of citizenship. This is, of course, the content of much civic education today.

If, therefore, we wish to educate future citizens for a different sort of participation, if we want them to challenge officials and the nature and scope of the democratic system itself—that is, if we want civic education and not civic indoctrination—then we also need to educate them to think critically about our democratic systems. Both political knowledge and critical thinking are required if citizens are to participate and share in what Amy Gutmann describes as the collective re-creation of our society or “conscious social reproduction”. Gutmann's arguments on how to justify democratic education are some of the best currently on offer.

THE GOOD DEMOCRAT such as:

The qualities of the good citizen are not, then, simply the skills necessary to participate in the political system. They are also the virtues that will lead one to participate, to want to participate, to have a disposition to participate. This is what Rousseau was referring to when he described how citizens in his ideal polity would “fly to the assemblies” (1988, 140). Citizens, that is, ought to display a certain kind of disposition or character. As it turns out, and not surprisingly, given our perspective, in a democracy the virtues or traits that constitute good citizenship are also closely associated with being a good or moral person. We can summarize that close association as what we mean by the phrase "good character."

THE GOOD PERSON such as:

Civic education as political action is to be contrasted with the more traditional form or teacher-centered education. This is not to suggest that those teaching political action will shirk or short-change knowledge and instruction in favor of exercises, simulations, and projects. Instead, knowledge and instruction arise out of the students' own experiences and interests. That is the point of student-centered in place of teacher-centered education.

Cosmopolitanism is an emerging and, because of globalization, an increasingly important topic for civic educators. In an earlier iteration, cosmopolitan education was multicultural education. According to both, good persons need to be aware of the perspectives of others and the effects their decisions have on others. While multicultural good citizens needed to think about the perspectives and plight of those living on the margins of their societies and about those whose good lives deviated from their own, good citizens in cosmopolitanism need to think, or begin to think, of themselves as “global citizens” with obligations that extend across national boundaries.

Martha Nussbaum, for one, thinks so. Nussbaum argues that our first obligation must be to all persons, regardless of race, creed, class, or border. She does not mean that we ought to forsake our commitments to our family, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. She means that we ought to do nothing in our other communities or in our lives that we know to be immoral from the perspective of Kant's community of all humanity . We should “work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern”

Philosopher Eamonn Callan, however, thinks otherwise. Callan wants to avoid a civic education, and the pursuit of justice that underlies it, “that gives pride of place to a cosmopolitan sensibility at the cost of particularistic affiliations”. In Callan's view our civic education should be constructed ideally around the concept of “liberal patriotism.” Although liberal patriotism is an “identification with a particular, historically located project of political self-rule”that is, American liberal democracy

Civic Education in EGYPT

The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) in Egypt has recently recognized the negative consequences of low political involvement of youth in public life. These have caused violence and instability. For this, the NDP has placed citizenship programs in the forefront of its political agenda. The latter acknowledges the roles of several societal institutions such as media, civil society, religion, and family. Nevertheless, it has neglected the role of educational institutions. This article claims that schools remain a main vehicle for the transmission of democratic values and focuses on the role of social studies curriculum to promote these values. It highlights the various issues that face Egyptian policy makers and educators in the preparation and implementation of a curriculum geared to promote democratic citizenship concepts.

A review and rethinking of CE is taking place not only in developing countries but also in well-developed and long-standing democracies . Moreover, there is voluminous research on the causal relationship between citizenship education and positive students’ political behavior in the developed countries. Yet, parallel research in this area is not noted in most developing countries. In addition, adequate research that addresses the complexities of implementing this type of education within the political and administrative contexts of the developing world is especially lacking.

This study is imperative for two reasons: first, it comes timely with recent government efforts to introduce major institutional reforms for the democratization of Egypt. Second, it is concurrent with recent cabinet policies to improve the quality of public education.

The research is divided into three sections. The first section includes a review of literature that covers concepts and issues related to citizenship and civic education. The second section includes major findings from interviews conducted with the focus group to explore their views about CE. The third section reviews the current process of administering and planning school curricula as well as public expenditure on basic education in Egypt.Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for policy makers and educators for the effective planning and implementation of CE programs in public schools.

Defining Civic Education

Civic Education has been described in scholarly research, in addition, in classical Arabic literature, in the local reports issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Education (MOE), as well as in executive reports issued by international agencies for development. To begin with the Ministry of Education’s definition, in one of its major publications issued in 2006 , the ministry explains CE as the "education that forms skills and abilities of students, enabling them to take a vital part in social and political life, creating civilians believing in the values of society, democracy and freedom.”

Civic Education however has been defined more comprehensively in international reports. For example, in a recent report issued by the United Nations in 2004 it has been described as educating youth on four components:

·Human rights, which include empowering citizens to be able to engage in social development;

·law, social justice and democracy, meaning political and civic participation,

·development meaning human development as the basis of human rights;

·peace, meaning peaceful resolution of conflict through negotiation and dialogue.

The UNDP definition is acknowledged in the literature as being the most inclusive explanation of what constitutes CE programs.

Hence it will be used in a later section of this study as the basis for a comparative analysis contrasting it with the definition given by the MOE on CE. Before the UNDP definition of CE, classical Arabic literature described the basis for democratic education. Most scholars from the Middle East based their writings in this regard on the preaching and writings of the Prophet Muhammad. Scholars based their writings on CE on the Prophet’s saying, "it is the duty of every Muslim man and woman to seek education".

They further assertedthat Arabs were encouraged to pursue knowledge for its own sake. The application of the concept of freedom of opinion was mentioned in Quran’s verses descended in Mecca and Madina. The total freedom of opinion is a principle that was assured by Islam since it emerged, and applied by the Prophet Muhammad and his successors (caliphs) especially in the time of Caliph Omar Ibn al Khattab.

According to verses of the Quran, the principles of dialogue and freedom of thought and expression are emphasized. These principles promote rational and critical thinking about the creation of the world upon which people are free and not forced to believe in God . Among the early elementary educational institutions were the mosque schools which were founded by the Prophet himself. In fact, the formal pursuit of knowledge had existed in one form or another since the time of the Greeks. The Arabs translated and preserved not only the teachings of the Greeks but those of the Indians and the Persians as well.

More importantly, they used these basic teachings as a starting point from which to launch a mass revolution in education that progressed in the Abbasid. During the Abbasid period, thousands of mosque schools were established throughout the Arab empire and the subjects of study were increased to include hadith (the science of tradition), fiqh (jurisprudence), philology, poetry, rhetoric and others.

In the tenth century, in Baghdad alone there were an estimated 3,000 mosques. In the 14 century, Alexandria had some 12,000 mosques, all of which played an important role in education. Other sources for defining CE were found in recent Egyptian writings. For example, Rayan (1993) defined CE as "the set of values that build the individual’s loyalty in serving its country to the extent to the self-sacrifice when needed".

Mahmoud (1997) defined it as a process that imparts a “set of values, principles, and trends that influence a student’s personality in a way to encourage him/her [in] reacting positively, understanding his/her rights, [and] obligations toward his/her society. And that builds his/her capacity in thinking appropriately in different situations.”

Hamed (2001) explained that CE is “a set of characteristics and attributes tha create in students the capacity to bear responsibility, participation, mutual collaboration between two parties, acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to solve problems in their society with objective and scientific approaches, and [practice of] critical thinking…on contemporary and controversial issues that face their society”.

Civic Education in AUSTRALIA

As part of the renewed emphasis on national identity and citizenship, interest in civic education in Australia has increased.

Although both Labor and Liberal national governments have been committed to introducing civic education, there is little research to show that the politically knowledgeable citizen is the more sophisticated and competent citizen.

This paper uses survey data collected in 1996 to examine the extent of political knowledge in Australia and to analyse its consequences for political literacy, competence, and participation. The results show that the median citizen could answer two out of seven factual questions correctly, with women, the young and those with less education being more likely to provide incorrect answers. The relationship between knowledge and attitudes and behaviour shows that factual knowledge increases political literacy and, to a lesser extent, competence.

However, knowledge has little effect on political participation, a major goal for civic education among politicians. Overall, the increased political knowledge that civic education creates is more effective in generating positive views of democratic institutions, and less effective in shaping political behaviour. The democratic citizen is expected to be well informed about political affairs to know what the issues are, what their history is, what the relevant facts are, what alternatives are proposed, what the party stands for, what the likely consequences are. (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee 1966) As an important area of primary and secondary education, the purpose of civic education is that through a series of activities, ultimately to nurture students to become active and conscious of society and perform as a citizen should bear responsibility.

Actively involved in school and social activities is the primary and secondary students an effective way to develop a sense of civic duty, relevant research shows that Australia has a relatively successful in this experience. In October 2004, the Australian Council for Educational Research collected 318 schools in 10712, and 249 students in grades six schools in 9536 Year 10 students as a sample, the implementation of the first nationwide assessment of civic education, the focus in this assessment report explains how citizens to participate in activities through primary and secondary students develop civic responsibility.

school students to participate in civic education activities on the cultivation of a sense of responsibility and analysis of the situation

Australia's education sector generally felt that the students develop a sense of responsibility must be rooted in the students participate in a variety of civic education activities. Australia's primary and secondary students participate in civic education activities in schools consists mainly of two different parts.

The first part is the students to participate in general school activities, specifically related to a sense of responsibility levels, including: students to vote for the class representatives; the formation of student representative council; student representatives of some schools to influence the decision-making; participating newspaper or magazine editor; to engage in peer support program (Peer Support Programs); to participate in community activities; to participate in extra-curricular activities seven main areas.

The second part is the students to participate in school management, specifically related to a sense of responsibility level, including: students should understand the importance of voting and elections; how to exercise the right of student representatives; learn to understand the point of view of people who dissent; learn to work together; understanding of the school mode of operation; for schools solution to the problem provide constructive comments.

2. Students to participate in civic activities in school management analysis

Primary and secondary students in Australia on the cultivation of civic responsibility in addition to participation in schools by creating an atmosphere for students to campus life, empowerment, with a sense of responsibility, the also-school life and community activities as a student understand a good platform for social interaction. In-school activities and community to nurture students so the family is responsible, socially responsible, ultimately cultivating a country and a strong sense of responsibility to the nation.

Australia-school civic education activities in various forms, are listed in-school civic education activities to students a sense of responsibility to cultivate a greater impact on several key aspects to be introduced, and students to participate in these activities, the frequency of in-depth analysis to learn more about the students participation in civic activities outside the status of the students develop a sense of responsibility.

Cultivate a sense of responsibility of school students to participate in civic education activities in Performance Analysis

1. Student participation in school activities, analysis of the achievements of citizens
2. Students to participate in extracurricular activities, civic education, analysis of the achievements

Australia pay more attention to the wealth of practical activities to develop in students the sense of civic responsibility, its successful experience is worth learning from.

1. To develop in order to cultivate civic responsibility-based Moral Education Objectives

The formation of a sense of responsibility is a non-spontaneous process, it needs to be cultivated through education, relying on the external orientation and internal self-experience to form. "International Board of Education in the 21st century," submitted to the UNESCO report "Learning - The Treasure Within," also said: "Education should promote the comprehensive development of each person, namely, physical, psychological, intelligence, sensitivity, aesthetic sense, personal sense of responsibility, spiritual values, etc. development. "in order to cultivate civic responsibility through the development of school-based moral education goals, to create a good atmosphere within the school, imperceptibly affect the responsibility of the students understanding by the extrinsic motivation into intrinsic needs, to enhance the students understanding of a sense of responsibility and ultimately create a good sense of civic responsibility.

2. Encourage students to participate in school management in a variety of practical activities to develop students sense of civic duty and responsibility

All along, China's school education in too many students do not dare let go and allow students to participate in school management in a variety of practical activities, a direct result of students within schools, little is known about the management and operation mode, a sense of responsibility rather weak, do not know how their rights and obligations.

To this end, schools should encourage students to participate in school management in a variety of practical activities in specific practical activities to develop students awareness of civic responsibility to improve the student's responsibility to cognitive abilities, foster a good sense of responsibility, reflecting the value of their own .

3. Home-school students a sense of responsibility shared

As the present primary and secondary schools are mostly only child, for which parents will always bored arranged in this part of the children independently of the matter, encouraged the children selfish, dependent, self-centered defects seriously affect the primary and secondary school citizenship the formation of a sense of responsibility, and thereby weakening effects of school education.

Therefore, parents must first have consciously strengthen the child's areas of responsibility in the family, specifically what things must independently complete the child to give children a clear responsibility to the children at different ages for different areas of responsibility. Secondly, we must give them enough confidence, I believe that a child can do a good job and comply with the requirements of the child responsibility to stimulate the enthusiasm of a child responsibility. Only concerted parents and school education on children's culture in order to receive the best results.

4. The implementation of community service, students sense of social responsibility

"Community service" refers to the students in their own living environment first hand experience, hands-on train how to get the basic point. In October 2001, the CPC Central Committee promulgated the "Implementation Outline for the building of civic virtue" requirement, we must continue to respect the legitimate rights and interests of individual social responsibility and commitment to the unity, in guiding citizens to conscientiously carry out the provisions of the Constitution and laws of the obligations, actively take up their own social responsibility.

The implementation of community service is to train students in social responsibility a good opportunity, and only to enable students to integrate into social life, active participation in social practice, in order to enhance civic awareness of students in order to enhance the sense of social responsibility of students to enable students to consciously serve the community, for others, social full of love, know how to live in harmony with nature, so that they become socially responsible citizens of the rape.